January 12th, 2026 Jeff Sprecher

Well, thank you all. I have a lot of friends here in the audience from many years of doing business here. I thought I would just start by talking a little bit about why my company is here, why I was here and a little bit about what we do beyond what Rafael graciously introduced. As Rafael mentioned, I went to Pepperdine University which is in Malibu, California and I met a guy in college and we started a company in California in the energy space to do alternative energy which really in that era was a tax credit deal. And I learned some of the ways of Wall Street and how to finance projects and create tax credits and strip them off a bit like what goes on in our state here around the movie industry. And as a result of that, I learned the electric power business. And I had this idea that you should be able to trade electric power, buy and sell electric power on an exchange. I had no idea how to do that. I'd never worked on Wall Street. I never traded. I don't even think I had a trading account. And by the way, I still don't have a trading account. Notwithstanding some of the acquisition things that people say about insider trading.

So I heard about a company that was based in Atlanta that was basically going bankrupt. It was owned by Mid American Energy, which is Warren Buffett's electric utility, and they had invested $35 million in this company here to try to create a network where electric utilities would exchange indications of interest for transmission capacity. And they tried, they spent the 35 mil. It didn't work and they were basically going to shut it down. So I heard about it, stepped in and made them an offer and I bought the company for a dollar a share and there were a thousand shares. So I bought it for $1,000 and I used that as the basis to build Intercontinental Exchange. The company was called the Continental Power Exchange and I was young and had a big ego and so I thought why would we limit ourselves to one continent so we should be intercontinental and why would we just be a power exchange we should be an everything exchange and so I changed the name to Intercontinental Exchange and a group of nine of us started building this technology. That was in year 2000 that was sort of the very peak and then fall of the dot era.

One of the reasons that Mid-America had put the Continental Power Exchange here in Atlanta was that this was at one point the nexus of connectivity to the internet. When all that fiber was going in the ground in the late '90s, it went north and south up the eastern seaboard and it went east and west and it intersected in Atlanta. And so they thought this is the place that if you were going to do something on the internet that you would want to do it. That obviously has been usurped now by Elon, you can be anywhere in the universe here now and satellites will point you to the internet. But at that time we were sort of known for our connectivity. So I got this idea to create an exchange and the team here started working on it. I lived in Beverly Hills. I'd been a serial entrepreneur and done pretty well as a young person. And so I would commute out here. I bought a 500 foot one room studio apartment in Midtown and I would fly in and get on MARTA and go to my studio there where I bought a used car that I kept and I'd go into the office from time to time.

Anyway, the dang company took off and I was here all the time. And so, anyway, we then hired Kelly Loeffler, my wife. She was in private equity in Texas, and we hired her to come in and do our budget. And she ultimately wrote our offer document called an S1 that we used to go public. And so I started seeing her, we were both single and started seeing her and then I was spending more and more time here. And she lived in Dallas and she was commuting back and forth to Dallas, I was commuting back and forth to LA and we finally settled here and so it was an organic way of finding the city which we both come to love.

In 2001, the first year that we were in business, I acquired a company called the International Petroleum Exchange of London, which was the oil industries exchange where they discovered the price of oil by having guys in funny jackets stand on a trading floor and flash hand signals. And I thought, well, we should just move that to the internet for crying out loud. And so they actually sold me the business and then it dawned on me that there were a lot of exchanges in the world. So I acquired maybe somewhere close to 30 of the world's exchanges and it was really just a moment in time when you could see that you could go from analog to digital and today we're the world's largest exchange group. At one point, people know us because we own the New York Stock Exchange because it's so iconic, but I also acquired the American Stock Exchange, the Pacific Stock Exchange, the Chicago Stock Exchange. I acquired the Paris Bourse, the French Stock Exchange, the Dutch Stock Exchange, the Portuguese stock exchange, the Belgian Stock Exchange, the Brazilian stock exchange. So anyway, I kind of went around the world rolling up these businesses and moving them from analog to digital.

One of the byproducts of the business that I'm in is the data that comes out of an exchange. Everybody wants to see the price of stocks or commodities or what have you. Oh, by the way, I bought the New York Board of Trade, which is the coffee, cocoa, cotton exchange from the movie Trading Places. So that's one. So anyway, one of the byproducts is data and the people that had floor-based exchanges would sell their data to Reuters or Bloomberg who would distribute them on these networks. And I was like, why would we sell our data when we're on the internet? Like why wouldn't you just put the data on the internet? So I created a data company and we started then acquiring other people's data and building out data. Today we have 750 exchanges and brokerage firms and financial services firms that create data and we distribute that on behalf of them to a network. That's huge because most people in the world that are in finance want to get the data from the New York Stock Exchange.

And then the third thing that I've been working on in the last few years is that it seemed ridiculous to me in this era, this tech era, like most of your kids and grandkids here will go on Amazon and buy deodorant and when you check out it'll say, do you want to buy now and pay later? And yet when we go to buy a house which has a foundation which you can see on Google that you can't move somehow it takes 60 days to buy a house and it seemed backwards to me that the consumable stuff you can buy with no credit and the one thing that is in Pavlov hierarchy of needs that you're going to be the last thing you give up, your house, is hard to buy. So, I started acquiring, turns out that the process that banks and lenders go through to put a young couple in a house is a very complicated, highly regulated process. And so I bought the leading CRM tool, the leading underwriting tool, the leading closing tool, the leading network for registering mortgages, the leading settlement and calculation engines and what have you. So I bought about seven companies for around $25 billion and have put them all together on a network so that it all talks to each other so that anyone who wants to become a lender could get on this network and all of the infrastructure is there. It's hooked directly to Fannie and Freddie and to the capital markets and so anyway we now are the largest, we probably touch 90% of all mortgages in the US. We have about 3,500 lenders that use the network and it's kind of similar to an exchange in that it's just bringing people together. I think we have 100,000 notary publics that are on it that can close mortgages and what have you.

So I am, you know, probably like Rafael, I'm hoping that the interest rate environment will be very conducive, that your children will go buy their starter home. And so anyway, that's what my company does. I just maybe want to finish that. I don't like public speaking and I always turn down these opportunities. I'm not good at it. I don't like it. And I'm just a worker bee and I just want to work. And my bestie Shan Cooper came to me and said, 'Jeff, you've got to come to Rotary.' And I was like, 'Shan, please.' And she said, 'No, but I'm going to have Rafael Bastik interview.' And so anyway, I'm here because I wanted to honor a friend and somebody that has given almost a decade I assume now to public service. I'm aware of the sacrifices that people make in public service having married somebody like that. And anyway, I just wanted to say thank you for what you've done. And looking forward to your next.

Well, if I could do anything, if I could retire and do something else, I would like to be a watchmaker. I would like to make a watch. I would like to be alone in a room by myself, with a bunch of little tiny tools and a microscope. And I really would like to make something that, you know, would stand the test of time.

It's the truth. That's what I would do if I could start over again.

There's an opening on CBS that happened over the weekend.

Yeah, it's interesting because I started the company with this idea of creating a power exchange and today we are the US's power exchange, electric power trades on our platform and we're also the largest energy exchange in the world. At a moment in time when you have these AI needs that are going up and also a rewiring of the supply chain of how global energy moves and so that's a short-handed way of saying I think we're real well positioned because people trade in order to manage risk and exposure to those markets. And one thing that I don't think people appreciate is like in this tariff debate that we've been having in the US over the last year. It's very much about putting tariffs on third parties but underneath that there's really a desire by the US government, the current administration, to fix the balance of payments. And the easiest way to do that is to have these foreign entities buy US energy. And so we've become as a country a big export nation. And now potentially the rewiring of Venezuela and keeping that in our hemisphere and denying it from China has completely changed the dynamics of where are we going to get our energy and how much we going to pay for it. And I don't know that we know the answer to that yet, but we're kind of in the middle of this massive pivot that is a supply chain change much like what happened during COVID. And consequently, my company last year the trading of energy grew double digits and it's grown every single year since the year I started the company and we keep thinking okay every oil company in the world is already on our platform and everybody like you and I don't buy barrels of oil or MMBTUs of natural gas or megawatts of power. Like who's the next incremental buyer that would ever come to this platform? And as a result of the demands and kind of the widening of institutional and commercial users that care about the price of energy, that platform just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

I do and I mean I think it's kind of one of those all of the above strategies like it's not just about fossil fuels. We need, you know, we're going to need every form of energy, including wind, solar, anything that can get built and diversity is helpful. And so, we see it all. We run the largest renewables markets in the world. I run the largest carbon markets in the world. I run the EU's cap and trade markets, which continue to grow. So, I don't know. We just see this investment all over the world in anything that can produce power and get on the grid quickly. And it's kind of an all the above strategy.

Some people think I'm really smart and I'm like this is like so obvious. Come on.

Yeah. So, a couple things. First of all, I'm the same age as Steve Jobs would be if he was still alive. We were born at the same time. And he was like a mentor to me. I never met him and I just read about him when I was a kid. And I realized like Apple, Steve Jobs was Apple, right? But he didn't really write code or invent anything. He curated ideas that a lot of really smart people around him created. He just had good taste. And the first thing I figured out is surround yourself with really good people that have good ideas and then just curate them. Get rid of the stupid ones and embrace the good ones and you know that's partly why you look smart. But secondly, I acquired a lot of companies. I've probably done at least 50 acquisitions and I'm never the guy that walks in there and lowballs somebody. To me like the New York Stock Exchange, people said well what are you going to do with it? I'm like it's the New York Stock Exchange. Like there's the business model, right? Like it's one of one. What's it worth? I don't know, whatever the seller would say it's worth. That's what it's... it's like buying a piece of art that is one of one. And so my negotiating strategy and please now that you hear this don't try to... Steve Hennessy sitting next to me. He's going to sell me a car.

I just, if you're going to buy a trophy, then you're going to have to pay trophy prices and occasionally stuff gets mismarked and what have you. But, you know, I just think quality matters. Legacy, brand, all those kinds of things, they matter and they're valuable and they're hard to build. There are great entrepreneurs in this country that have built brands, you know, Google and Tesla and what have you. That's hard, man. It's much easier to buy somebody else's hard work and the sacrifice that many others made and then help take it to the next level. And so, you know, I think sellers like selling to me because it's like this guy's a laydown, you know. Anyway.

Yeah, I think that the idea when we do acquisitions is is there something that they can't do or won't do partly because of scale, distribution, capital. You know, I just invested, you may ask me about this company called Polymarket that you know, that thing has no revenue and we said we'll give you two billion, like that changed that company. So those things matter but not necessarily the purchase price.

Yeah, as a manager I let good people... the first thing I learned from going to an entrepreneur where I made every decision. Took the trash out, shut the lights out, answered the phone, bought the staplers and the paper for the photocopier. Like that was the way the company started. Yeah, you make every decision. And in the arc of building a company, you have to give up decisions. And one thing I learned very quickly is that 100% of the people that work for me make their decisions differently than I do. And you just got to get over it. Like I was a guy in college that would wait till the night before the test and I would cram. And I always had these kids that sat in the front row and they were like, 'Teacher, teacher.' And they would say to me like, 'Well, we're already done with our homework.' And I was like, that's not due for a month.

Anyway, yeah, you just learn like, okay, everybody's got a different style. And so I just measure people by results, you know, let's just agree on what the results are and however you're going to skin the cat, I'll be tolerant. And I'm incredibly tolerant of some silly ideas or methodologies that people use, but that work. And I don't know, and people, I think when you give people independence and support and tolerate their peccadillos, it's a good place to work.

And you got to pay them well, right?

Yes.

Yeah, and I learned something from Goldman Sachs actually who I admired when I was starting out because they were a partnership and I was like how do they have this legacy of this company that's like 100 years old and it continues to grow and so I created a management committee and we meet every week for 4 hours and we go through every part of the company and every single person on the management committee, I think there's 18 people, we go through everybody's business and we talk about everything and we fight and we argue we shouldn't do this or why'd you do that and we want to know, you know, I heard you were playing golf with so and so. Why did you take the day off? And all this backstabbing stuff that exists in a company, we go through all of it. And then our agreement is when we walk out of the room, we're all one. And if you got another issue, bring it next week. We're here, you know, and that all kind of works like this team mentality.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I'm not a manager. I don't know how to manage people.

Well, Sam came to... I saw Sam when I walked in here, came to me when he was running the Metro Chamber and he said, and nobody even knew who I was and somehow he found me and he said, you know, there's the Atlanta way here and the Atlanta way is we all got to contribute and I'm like, you know, hey, I'm like nobody. I'm building a company and I'm busy and he really got in my head and he kept working on me and got me into the chamber and the next thing you know I met half you guys in the room and we started doing other things and other things and other things and I just feel like Atlanta has this, I don't know what it is in the water here but we all, it's bipartisan, it's ageless, we all come together for the betterment of the city and it's gone on like that since the civil rights movement and maybe before. And I don't know, it's one of the great things about this city. I actually pulled back a little bit from my direct civic involvement when my wife went into the Senate because a bunch of you guys came up and said, 'You need to tell your wife to do so and so and would you tell the president to do so and so?' And I realized like I'm not that, it's not my job. I'm not a messenger. But I still philanthropically and what have you, you know, we and to honor people like you, it's just such a great thing that just doesn't exist in any other city. And so I don't know, thank you, Sam. And thank you all for befriending me over the years.

And you lived...

There's nothing like this. Like people in LA don't even say they're from LA. They say they're from Beverly Hills or Santa Monica or wherever. It's just a very very different thing.

Okay, I can do that stuff.

So I invested in this company called Polymarket that I mentioned to you which is essentially a prediction market, i.e. a betting site, and it was started in order to place a prediction on the site, you had to pay in crypto. And it fascinated me when I met Shane, the founder, and learned about what they had done and what it is. And now we have these stablecoins. We took the company Circle public on our exchange and are close to Jeremy and Howard Lutnick, who I've known for 25 years, who's now our commerce secretary. His sons are really one of the driving forces behind Tether, which is the other global stablecoin. The thing about it is that these stablecoins are what we would call bearer instruments. In other words, if you have title to the stablecoin, it's yours. And if you hand your serial number of that stablecoin to another party, they own it. And that's very different. Even though we can all go in the middle of the night, you can get on Amazon and you can buy something and put it on your credit card and it will arrive. The reality is the money doesn't move for a couple of days. And if you're dissatisfied, you can complain and Mastercard will actually go claw the money back from the vendor. This is a bearer instrument. It means you lose your wallet back like when a lot of us were kids, you lost your wallet, you might get the wallet back, but there was nothing in it. These are bearer instruments and so when you're... and they move on the internet 24/7 everywhere in the world. Tether has 500 million people that have Tether accounts. 500 million. Okay. I had a very senior regulator, I won't say who, in Europe called me up and said, 'Jeff, you know about this stuff, we're trying to figure out how to regulate it, how we can contain it.' I'm like, 500 million people. You're going to do what? What do you think you're going to do? Like, the cat has run out of the barn. There are countries now where the national currency is Tether. If you're in a taxi cab, if you're a startup, a roadside vendor, a farmer in Southeast Asia, in parts of Africa, Tether is the only accepted currency. So, anyway, I figured like we better get on, we better figure this out. And it's hard to regulate. It can lend itself to money laundering. Came out over the weekend that Venezuela was getting around the tariffs by accepting payment for oil in Tether. But you know regulators are going to have to get involved in it and people are going to lose money because it is a bearer instrument and we're going to have to figure out how to kind of put conventional finance over this overlay. But the wires that we grew up using through banking are very much moving quickly to the internet.

Good time to retire.

Correct. Yeah.

Opportunity and chaos down as well.

Yes.

Yes. And but the other thing that has happened that is very subtle that what crypto has done since COVID in my mind, this is my opinion, not backed by any facts. What it has done is that these stablecoins are denominated in US dollars and it has dollarized the world. Like you're starting to see the European Central Bank and the UK central bank say oh my gosh do we need to, and even China, do we need to issue our own stablecoin type currency because the world is quickly dollarizing and commerce 24/7 in dollars.

So, we're under pressure. New York Stock Exchange by law, we have to close by law the stock exchange at 4 in the afternoon. Well, Robinhood has come out and which a lot of your kids use because they have free trading. They're trading 24 hours a day and a lot of that volume is coming from overseas because all these overseas people, they all want to own the Magnificent 7 and they all have dollars in a Tether account and it's like they're buying US stocks. And this is something that the legacy people like me were not responsible for. We have to close. But these innovators have created 24/7 markets, 24/7 capital movement and we're trying to catch up much like the regulators and figure out what does this mean for our business.

There's actually... Yeah, it's a very good question. We actually run an auction so that the, you know, starting a little after 9, you start to put your orders in and we don't open, and we still have the floor guys, the guys called specialists which NASDAQ has an algorithm, we use people, but we are running in the behind the scenes an auction which is where's all the buying interest, where's all the selling interest and the specialists can't open the stock until that's in balance so that sometimes if you look online at a stock that you follow you'll see that it opened at 9:31, 9:32, 9:35. Similarly, we won't close a stock until it's all been balanced. And so, it's having to take in all of the overnight information that is increasingly getting more and more complex into that auction process so that when you do open, the goal is you open and then if you were to look at the tape, it stays at that opening for a while before it starts moving around.

So we see, we know a lot about it. We have an AI group inside like most big companies and first of all our own use of AI is wherever there is language. These are really language models. And so, if you call our help desk, we have a large help desk. I have about 15,000 employees now. And if you call our help desk, it's looked at your phone number, it's looked at your records, it tries to figure out what your problem may be, it alerts the person before they answer the phone. And so, and then it writes up whatever you're talking about and puts it in a feedback loop. And so we use it for language. But what we're seeing is the trading firms that are using it are not quite convinced that they're going to let the AI model handle their money. They're going to let it narrow the range of outcomes and then the human actually pushes the button. I don't know how long it is until, you know, the computer is trading with a computer, but right now the humans are still involved. And by the way, one last thing I would say to you is we have all these AI tools that we're building and none of you want to pay for them. It's a huge investment that everyone is making. If you're building a data center or selling energy, great. Nobody wants to pay for this stuff. Everybody, we've all been spoiled. We all want it for free.

Think of ChatGPT or whatever. Like, nobody wants to pay for this stuff.

It's now in the stuff we do, it's an expectation of our customer base that you're going to have that in there because if you don't, your competitor does and so you better be investing in it just to stay even. So that's the big dilemma. Fortunately, the thing can write code and it can replace humans. So you're taking your own cost down, but you're not passing that through necessarily.

It's a good question. First of all, I'm an optimist or you wouldn't do what I try to do if you didn't think you could do it. But Jeff, I look at when I was a kid, we went to the moon and the thing that was in the Mercury capsule was smaller than what I have on my iPhone right now. And the amount of compute that we have built since in my lifetime is unbelievable, unimaginable when I was a kid. And yet the labor force is asymptotically bigger. And there's this optimistic part of me that says we're going to... what is really being built in these data centers is compute. And I just think every time we expand the New York Stock Exchange and say, 'Oh, we've just put a new upgrade in and now it's got 20% more capacity,' like instantaneously it gets used because there's just insatiable demand for productivity gains and ideas of using compute. And I just think we're going to have more people in the job market. I really do. I know there may be some dislocation and what have you. You know, okay, you're not going to be a checkout girl because we can self-checkout or what have you, but I really think that we are going to adapt in the same way we have since I was a kid and we went to the moon.

That's a great question. The problem right now is we're in NFL season and all these prediction guys are claiming that they have federal immunity from local law and they're all being sued by states and there are some states that have some fair arguments which is like in this state you're not supposed to gamble or in this state you got to be 18 to gamble. Other things that as a society we all would come to common conclusion we don't want gambling addicts that are 12 years old. So, there's still a lot of federal and state jurisdictional issues that are going to have to get sorted. But to your question, I invested in Polymarket because I think there's going to be a market on everything. My understanding from the White House is that when we flew the mission over to Iran to bomb the nuclear facilities, they had Polymarket up in the war room.

Because that was a 20-hour flight and they were not betting on it, but they wanted to see if anything leaked, it would probably show up there. Somebody that figured it out that was counting pizza trucks that showed up at the Pentagon or whatever the heck, that somebody came to two and two, you would see it in that market. And partly what we're doing with our data company is we're going to distribute Polymarket data. Polymarket just did a deal last week with the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones to provide news to them and I think this is going to become hot news. The way that platform works is that there are thousands of what they call polymarkets. In other words, different things you can bet on. And as one gets hot, it rises to the top of the stack. And you've now got institutional managers that have this screen up. And so they may have Twitter to see like what's going on in the world, but then this thing puts a price on it. Like, okay, how important is this thing? And what are the second and third and fourth order impacts of that news that I never thought of at impacting that somebody just placed a bet on? And so I think the combination of Twitter and Polymarket is a threat to the hot news that normally would come out of a news agency or it's going to be an adjunct to it essentially.

I appreciate it. As you know, you and my wife and I have been trying to work together on some things and so I appreciate you being here with me.

By Kathy, somebody here may want to ask Teemo about selling me Porsches because he would know the laydown theory.